The Epic London Adventure- Part 2

Friday

Friday morning we got up and had breakfast at the hostel. Then the three of us hopped on a train to central London to have a tour of Historic Royal London. I'd been on the tour before, but Mady and Victoria hadn't yet. 

Victoria, Me, and Mady

On the tour, we saw Big Ben, the Palace of Westminster, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey... I won't really go into it. If you want to know more of what we saw, check out my previous post here. The only difference was our tour guide. Our tour guide was a wonderful young man by the name of Jake. He was Jake the Tour Guide (not Jake from State Farm. And he wasn't wearing khakis.)

Victoria and Jake, the Tour Guide

After the tour we had a quick lunch and then hopped on the train to Watford for our tour of the Harry Potter Studios! It was so exciting! (I'm getting excited again, just typing about it.)

 There was a bus that took us straight from the Watford train station to the doors of the Harry Potter Studio. And it was even decorated, although I think they should have made it to look like the Knight Bus...

But we got there. I was so excited! We redeemed out tickets and hopped into line, which moved very quickly, and then we were in! The first thing we saw was the Great Hall. Everything was so lifelike, and the detail was amazing, but I guess it has to be for movies like this. There were two house tables set up, with the head table at the front, with several of the professors' costumes.

Dumbledore's Costume. Doesn't it look awesome? 

 Then we left the Great Hall and entered a giant room full of props from every movie. They literally had everything, from the Mirror of Erised to Dumbledore's Office.

The three of us in the Mirror of Erised

The Fat Lady was present. The Griffindor common room was there right next to her, shabby armchairs and all.

Here's Harry and Ron's dormitory!

Here's the spiral staircase to Dumbledore's office.
 Sadly, I didn't know the password. 

The office looked so complete, it even had a cabinet with his pensieve.

 There were several other sets, including classrooms (the potions classroom was my favorite!) and the Chamber of Secrets.

There was also the death eater side of things. Here we see a nasty scene in which the snake Nagini kills a Hogwarts teacher at a meeting of the evil death eaters.

They even had a display of all the creepy
death eater masks. Gave me the shivers. 

The Hogwarts Express was even there! With scenes from several of the movies. Here's Ron and Harry getting high on sugar:

 
Then it was our turn to get high off sugar, with some famous Butterbeer. I can't quite describe the taste. It was basically like liquid butterscotch, with cream. Maybe cream soda? All I can tell you was it was really really good.

 We visited Harry's horrible family at Privet Drive, and saw the Knight Bus. I tried to get a picture of the talking shrunken head, but I couldn't get a decent one. It was there though. You'll have to use your imagination for that one.

 After that, we came to Diagon Alley. That was one of my favorite parts. They had Ollivanders, the Weasley's joke shop, Madam Malkin's robes, the apothecary... everything.

The last thing was the Creature Shop and the model rooms. The creature shop had all the prosthetics and animatronics used by the costume and creature departments. They had models of the mermaids and inferi. I liked the mermaid head: 

 They had a life sized animatronic Buckbeak. and a giant Aragog hanging from the ceiling. All the concept art was on the walls from all the different ideas people had had.

Buckbeak concept art

But my absolute favorite part of the whole day was the very last room. They had a huge model of the complete Hogwarts castle. It was so beautiful, and it even had lights twinkling in the windows. It was the perfect end to a great day.